Book Reviews 203

Among other things, this book suggests just how difficult it may be
for Khumbu Sherpas and others to, in fact, resist or manage the global
media and market forces that propel large numbers of tourist trekkers to
the Everest region. Rogers discusses how the 1996 Everest disaster (and
the subsequent flurry of books, articles, and movies about it) led to “a
stampede of trekkers and climbers to the Himalaya” (p. 225). This kind of
coverage increasingly isolates “Everest” from Nepal itself, luring a kind
of tourist mainly intent on a kind of adventure “trophy bagging” but with
little or no interest in Nepal per se. Trekking agencies report a decline in
the young “hippie-type” trekker of the 1970s and 80s and a rise in older,
wealthier “yuppie” tourists (p. 226) that tend to be less interested in local
culture, and more demanding of the “tourism product” that they have paid
for and expect to be provided. With tourism so tied to the vagaries of
global market forces (not to mention national and regional political
instabilities), the kind of intentional, carefully planned, and well-managed
tourism that Rogers advocates will never be easy.
Mark Liechty
University of Illinois at Chicago

Narayan Wagle. 2008. Palpasa Café. English translation by Bikash

Sangraula. Kathmandu: Publication nepa ~ laya.

Fiction is one method of portraying war and conflict. Fictional narratives

can demand to be taken seriously as an equally legitimate branch of
knowledge about war by the strength of their own verve and written
power. However telling authentic fictional stories about real war is a
difficult, high wire balancing act. There are dangers of never escaping
history and also never developing a narrative, neither being factually
correct nor descriptively interesting. Novelists may successfully walk the
tightrope and, at times, go on to produce moments seemingly more
authentic and powerful than the mass of typically sterile and academic
reports usually spawned by war. Like travelogues, journalism and
personal testimony fiction can provide another, perhaps more human way
of talking about conflict and tumultuous recent history as well as in
writing words against war.
The English language translation of the best-selling Nepali novel
Palpasa Café by the editor of the newspaper Kàntipur, Narayan Wagle, is
one attempt to write about war and traverse this high wire act. Like all
bestsellers it may be more widely bought than read. It mostly fails to gain
204 Studies in Nepali History and Society 13(1), 2008

fictional take-off but is worth reading, reviewing and discussing seriously

not out of sympathy for Wagle’s or the translation team’s large effort, but
as a rare attempt to write fictionalised truths in English about the Nepali
conflict.
The novel also, obviously, reflects the author’s own experience as a
Brahmin male based largely in Kathmandu. I hope to show that Wagle’s
journalism background rather than his caste identity is crucial in
understanding Palpasa Café’s successes and failures. It is to Wagle’s
credit that he has written about what he knows and not attempted to
include many different aspects of Nepal which would, incidentally, be a
very boring exercise in paint-by-numbers prescriptive fiction.
Unfortunately Palpasa Café currently seems to be more discussed for a
literary prize that it should or should not have won, as well as for its
marketing process than for its actual content.
One intention of translating the novel into English is surely to help
foreigners, both tourist and expatriates alike, to understand what
happened in the recent Nepali past. The novel contains a short helpful
glossary and does not overburden the text with overlong explanations of
detail for non-Nepalis (as Manjushree Thapa’s otherwise excellent The
Tutor of History tends to). Like the Nepali edition the book is perhaps
also aimed at the Nepali urban middle-class, whom Wagle presumably
knows well, as well as diaspora Nepalis. The real dedicatees of the novel
are all victims of the war and the novel as a whole can be seen as a
fictionalised attempt at not forgetting, during a time when, perhaps, many
wish victims would move on.
Palpasa Café is the story of a Kathmandu-based artist, Drishya, who
falls in love with a Nepali American returnee, Palpasa. Along the way
Drishya also sees for himself the devastating effects of Nepal’s conflict in
the hills, via a mysterious old college friend (named Siddhartha) turned
Maoist. These are the main characters who tell Wagle’s story. The novel
stands out primarily not as a fiction tale with authentic characters but,
instead, as an embodiment of what Drishya calls “the stand…of the
people who resisted the war-mongers on both sides” (p. 213). In broad
brushstrokes, like the artist Drishya, Wagle tries to use the novel to
protest “against both warring sides…., my colours showing my support
for the third camp” (p. 213).
The novel begins with a description of the central character, Drishya,
being abducted. This is told within a post-modern introduction which, like
the similarly ironical ending is deliberately out of place with the rest of
the novel’s straightforward narrative style. The introduction is post-
 Book Reviews 205

modern in the sense that Wagle introduces himself as a character, a

journalist who has written the true story of Drishya during the conflict. In
his final second cameo appearance within the pages, Wagle uses the
format to acknowledge with a wink that he might not have done his
characters justice and that “all written works are incomplete. Something’s
always missing. There’s always more to add” (p. 231). Using the author-
as-character is a risky fictional device suggesting a paucity of original
material and an overly self-referential style (especially for an existing
full-time journalist). By limiting it to the bookends Wagle nearly carries it
off but his final cameo appearance suggests a lack of confidence in his
first published fictional material as well a need to spell out and reiterate
his main intentions to the reader.
The main part of the novel begins with a portrayal of Drishya and
Palpasa’s first encounters in Goa and then moves onto Kathmandu
covering Drishya’s artistic and personal torments. A large and dramatic
section of the novel is then given to Drishya’s journeys across conflict-
wrecked hills before inevitable tragedy strikes and he returns to
Kathmandu. Throughout long sections are taken up by dialogues between
Drishya and Palpasa, or Drishya and Siddhartha. These dialogues explore
individual tragedies and conflict inside the main protagonists concerning
the well-worn themes of love, art and politics. These inner explorations
are not well connected with the outer violent conflict in Nepal. This is
symbolic of a wider indecision in the novel between portraying what
Wagle the journalist saw and what Wagle the novelist wishes to write;
between Wagle’s journalism and his fiction.
Wagle’s best observed sections, perhaps unintentionally, are in the
broader canvas he paints using his journalistic brushes – firstly in the
disappearances and general tension of post-royal massacre in Kathmandu
and then of the conflict in the hills. Wagle, through Drishya, writes with
reflective knowing of the feverish and out of control atmosphere after the
royal massacre and how “a thick fog of uncertainty hung over us all”
(p. 72). Wagle, ever the journalist, also notices small details like how “it
was risky for men to walk about without having shaved their heads in
mourning” (p. 72). Wagle also cannot help noting the cavalcade of
foreign journalists suddenly arriving in Nepal, as tourists leave. The
“desperate journalists” swarm on Durbar Marg “erecting satellite censors
and positioning their cameras for live telecasts” (p. 75).
The novel also carefully portrays the particular impact of the conflict
in the hills. Wagle’s descriptions of schools being blown up, emptying
villages, indiscriminate bombs, abduction, and mourning Nepali families
206 Studies in Nepali History and Society 13(1), 2008

are generally hard-hitting and powerful. Wagle finds a particularly

credible voice in his description of a Maoist attack on a district
headquarter. The attack is described as briskly as it happens: “I held on
tightly to my cot. ‘Shoot! Shoot!’ Myriad noises assaulted my ears. The
cat wailed” (p.132). Then, dazed and wearied, the market awakes and the
shell-shocked inhabitants “looked at each other as if surprised so many
people were still alive” (p. 133). The post-attack shock of a lodge-owner
is also distressingly well-represented through her “incomprehensible
mumbling,” violent “trembling” and her son having “wet his pants”
(p. 133).
As elsewhere the purple passages involve more of what Wagle the
journalist saw and heard about and less of what the reader might expect a
painter like Drishya to feel and note. Wagle bitingly mocks his own
profession again when a helicopter fall of journalists lands in the district
headquarter after the Maoist attack. Hunting for fast answers they “all
rushed away” herd-like before Drishya “could answer the last question”
(p.135). The journalists demonstrate a habitually short attention span as
they move from questioning Drishya to a nearby policeman to the police
inspector to the chief district officer in rapid succession.
Mourning families in the hills are also closely observed such as those
of his dead ritual friend, Resham. Miit-Ba is “in despair” after Resham’s
death and he and his wife “sometimes...weep, sometimes they mumble
strange things. There are days when they don’t say a single word and days
when they never stop talking” (p. 140). Drishya hears about another old
couple who have one son in the army and one in the rebels. He is told
“The one in the army sent them a message saying....they should go to
Kathmandu because it’s too dangerous for him to come back here. But the
old folk can’t go to Kathmandu....Their grief’s going to kill them one
day” (p. 143). Wagle wishes to tell the common tales of individual and
family trauma from the conflict. Whether fiction or journalism is the best
vehicle for him to do this is debatable.
Palpasa Café, almost incidentally, neatly notes individual stories in
other aspects of modern Nepal. This includes diaspora Nepalis (especially
those connected to the USA), retired Gurkhas, Nepali-foreigner
relationships, trekking tourists (endlessly laughing over their photos in
Thamel) and internal migration for school and work. There is a touching
description of young boys entering the Kathmandu valley for the first
time which leads Drishya back to his own childhood. When Drishya finds
out that the young boys are from the same region as he, his “eyes welled
with tears...” and says “When I entered the ‘Nepal’ valley for the first
 Book Reviews 207

time, I’d been like these boys, excited and uncertain” (p. 38). Wagle too
moved to Kathmandu for study from Tanahu and part of the power of this
passage may come from his own autobiographical recollections.
There are many aspects to criticise about Palpasa Café and things also
perhaps lost in translation too. Wagle’s main characters are not believable
except as two-dimensional archetypes, railroaded into standing up for art,
politics or creativity in extended and overlong dialogues. Palpasa
represents the creative spirit, and the younger generation and is mostly
there as the perfect foil for Drishya’s banter. Her side of the story is never
told and as Wagle states in the post-modern end piece that “would’ve
given my novel another dimension” (p. 231). Many readers may be
tempted to skip the weak characterisations and dialogues all together in
order to reach Wagle’s more interesting and well-written description of
war-time events.
The style for the awkward dialogues model is set at the start of the
novel proper when Palpasa and Drishya meet in Goa. At one point
Palpasa says “Oh, didn’t I tell you where I was staying?” Drishya replies
“No, and I didn’t ask.” Palpasa replies “Then you’re a fool as well!”
Drishya then replies “I wasn’t before I met you". Palpasa asks what he
means and he replies “I lost my senses when I met you” (p. 12). The
dialogues barely evolve beyond this kind of he-said, she-said repartee and
schoolchild level of male-female taunts. When it does Drishya is the
authoritative model artist-philosopher proclaiming on the one hand that
“artists care very much, especially when they find someone who
appreciates their work...” (p. 19), while later, typically, pondering aloud
that “There’s energy in inner conflict....It drives human beings to search
for clarity and resolution....” (p. 30).
Later too the Maoist underground figure Siddhartha and Drishya
argue, occasionally with verve, around the age-old debates of art and
politics and whether it is “possible to create without destroying” (p. 82).
These debates are slightly more nuanced and realistic than those between
Palpasa and Drishya. However, even here Siddhartha does not develop an
actually existing character but, instead, is only really alive as an ideologue
served up to fit Wagle’s demand for an art versus politics debate.
Siddhartha, the old college friend and confirmed Maoist, sums up the
difference between him and Drishya saying “You give too much weight
to the importance of the individual” (p. 84). Drishya, the artist, believes
“in the supremacy of the free individual” (p. 84) and cannot accept
violence and deaths in the name of a supposedly greater communal good.
208 Studies in Nepali History and Society 13(1), 2008

The image of Siddhartha largely comes not from a short physical

description (Wagle only says he has a “bony face,” “a cap and dark
glasses” and was “unshaven, tall and lean, with prominent cheekbones”
(p. 75)) but from his stereotypical torrent of leftist vocabulary. Siddhartha
mouths the words we expect of a Maoist ideologue: ‘totality’,
‘objectively’, ‘fundamental structures’, ‘a scientific approach’,
‘reactionary’ and so on (p.79, 82, 83, 86). Drishya responds in kind as an
artist and ordinary citizen and the characters remain underdeveloped
straw men.
In general, the Maoist figures and security forces have no real role in
this novel and are intentionally shadowy, almost non-human ideologues.
Interestingly when Wagle later met Prachanda (and Baburam Bhattarai)
as editor of K à ntipur for a secret interview in February 2006,
“Demystified!” was apparently the first word Wagle uttered after leaving
the interview venue (http://blog.com.np/united-we-blog/2006/02/12/a-
rendezvous-with-prachanda/). Their representation as another species in
Palpasa Café dates the novel to a time before Maoists came above ground
and on TV.
Language and translation issues also hinder the novel. At Drishya and
Palpasa’s first meeting in Goa, the repetitive description of Palpasa’s eyes
as “fresh, juicy” like “slices of pineapple” which “were dripping with
juice” is embarrassing and downright corny (p.16, 17). The nauseating
language continues in the following Drishya-Palpasa dialogue. Drishya
asks “What did I steal?” Palpasa replies “My heart.” Drishya responds
“So, you’re calling me a thief?” and later says “Is it only your heart I’ve
stolen?” “I wanted to steal all of you...” (p.31). The book also contains
several small grammatical errors such as the sentence: “I wanted to my art
to contribute to the transformation” (p.120).
For some reason the language in the letters from Drishya and Palpasa
appears to have been much more closely revised than passages elsewhere.
For example Drishya writes a letter filled with uncharacteristically
attractive English to Palpasa via her Grandmother:
Your hopes are pinned on the gods, the farmers’ on the mountains and
mine on you. I made you dance and you were happy. The day I saw you
dance was the happiest day of my life. It was as though the snow on the
mountains was melting in the sun and a magnificent rainbow had appeared
on the horizon (p. 96).
There are also problems concerning the book’s narrative structure. From
the end of chapter nineteen a series of devastating events occur in rapid
 Book Reviews 209

and very unbelievable succession. The reader is asked to believe that the
central character, Drishya, is spectacularly unlucky in terms of being
affected by the war. Since the reader does not know Drishya as a fully-
rounded character, only instead as the fountain of wise home truths
around art, then we consequently care less about what happens to him or
those he loves.
Wagle’s simple message throughout the novel seems summed up by a
boatman who rows Drishya away from death:
The boatman strained against the current. “It’s so sad to see war in our
country,” he said. “It’s terrible to see our own people die. Don’t you think
so, bhai?” (p. 169)
This message could have been conveyed in other ways more suited to
Wagle the journalist. As it is Palpasa Café ends up being an unfulfilling
mixture of occasional journalistic insight, weak characterisation and poor
dialogue. Fiction has something to offer as an attempt at writing another
form of the truth, to be another kind of historical record and memorial for
victims. And Palpasa Café has these noble aims of writing against war,
bringing home the personal devastation of the conflict and remembering
the victims. A translated novel will always lose something in the process
of translation and perhaps loses more when it tries to honestly write about
such disputed recent history and war. However, Wagle would have been
better to convey his thoughts, experiences and feelings about the war in a
factual context, perhaps in the form of a travelogue or snapshots of
different conflict-affected lives around the country.
James Sharrock
UNMIN

Baral, Ajit, Bela Malik, DR Pant, Jagannath Adhikari, Purna Basnet, and
Usha Titikshu. 2008. By the Way: Travels through Nepal’s
Conflict. Kathmandu: Martin Chautari.

This book of 119 pages, comprises five chapters plus an introduction. It is

written by an eclectic bunch of authors, a student of English literature, an
editor, two journalists, two social scientists, and a photographer. The
varied authorship is reflected in the diversity of the topics covered. The
book opens with a chapter by Jagannath Adhikari, a lively description of
the experience of living and travelling in Bhojpur in the Eastern region of
Nepal, just before a major attack in 2004. The main focus is on